Furnation... banned in China?!
For those of you who follow world-wide internet policies, China's list of banned websites continue to grow, actively filtered out by what's colorfully coming to be called 'The Great Firewall of China'.
Out of curiosity, I began testing which websites are banned.
And the first one I entered to see reported inaccessible? Furnation.
Incredulous, I ran the test again, and a few more times. 1 successful attempt to reach it, out of 20. It leads to curious speculation; is it something as simply benign as a router misconfiguration? Perhaps a few servers along the way had conked out? Maybe Slashdot having linked the testing server has resulted in a sudden drop of reliability of the testing method?
Or maybe the mainland Chinese are afraid of teh cultural revolution that some ears and tails might unleash. (He typed firmly tongue-in-cheek.)
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Bahumat — read stories — contact (login required)an office manager from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Comments
Flayrah is also unaccessible...
China vs Furries?
Seems goverment of China thinks of us as too demoralising for their people.
White Lion
I doubt it is a ban against furries in particular, but instead either a routing issue, or an attempt to ban all non-Chinese sites. I tried a variety of sites from Furry to US political, news, and other agencies. Even Ebay is not available.
I'd say it's also possible the testing script is broken.
Maybe they're afraid of the effect of badly drawn pr0n on the stability of Chinese culture.
That was unfair! 3% of the artistically-challenged scrawlings on Furnation isn't even pr0n at all!
I tried a variety of sites (mostly furry but a few others as well) on 8-31 and got NO unaccessible readings. These included a couple of really x rated sites.
Richard Reid
Captain; Webship Corwinda
http://www.furnation.com/corwinda
[opinion] Think about it... what's probably the easiest way to watch what's going on? Close down almost everything, then wait for requests to roll in for who specifically wants to see what. Then you can pick and choose the prosecution at your leisure... And while that's not an assurance of what's really going on... it's at least a probably block by block blockage of ip's by content provider. [/opinion]
I tried some sites - VCL, various yiff-oriented sites, and some better-known personal pages. They all passed.
Some of the things banned:
BBC news
Amnesty International
FreeTibet.org
Google
Ebay
Furnation
Some of the things not banned:
The FBI
CNN
Boycott Beijing 2008
Peacefire (anti-censorware site)
Jim Hardman's Skunkworks
Yerf
FurBid
It's almost random :P
Melissa "MelSkunk" Drake
I am sorry but this is kinda rediculus. It is NOT a ban like some of the American news sources state. It has been blaimed (in privet) on a falty fiber connection on one of China's main hubs. The reason why one can connect sometimes and other times not is Fiber's ability to "self heal" and this allows you to connect at all. The reason why you can get it sometimes and othertimes not, is because there are more users then the system can handle redirecting through other paths.
I am not sure but it lokes like a fiber link that goes through Europe is failing to be specific.
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